Danny Shittu

Danny Shittu: Ninety-Two Letters and a Phone Call

At seventeen, with a place to read computer science, Daniel Olusola Shittu decided against it. "I can't work in an office all my life," he reasoned. "I'm going to be a footballer." He then wrote to all ninety-two clubs in the English league. The responses were negligible. He got in anyway, by telephone, in twenty minutes — and went on to play 346 professional matches in England and to appear at a World Cup.

The East End, and Talking His Way In

Shittu was born on 2 September 1980 in Lagos and moved to England at seven, growing up in London's East End in what he has described as a tough area, one of seven siblings. His idol was Sol Campbell, the Arsenal and England defender, who lived nearby — proximity that made the ambition feel less absurd than it sounds. He was also a childhood friend of the rapper Dizzee Rascal, who has described Shittu as being like a big brother to him.

The letters having failed, he called Charlton Athletic's academy directly and spent twenty minutes persuading them to look at him. They offered a week's trial. He stayed six, and left with a professional contract.

Loftus Road

He made his senior breakthrough at Charlton between 1999 and 2002, and a 2001 loan at Blackpool made him a favourite there — two goals and an appearance in the Third Division play-off final, won 4–2 against Leyton Orient. Queens Park Rangers signed him permanently in January 2002 for £350,000, and it was there he became the player people remember: 182 appearances and seventeen goals across his first spell, defined by robust, combative work in the heart of the defence. He helped QPR to promotion to the Championship in 2003–04, finishing second. He later returned to the club in 2011–12, and was eventually inducted into the Forever R's Club, which described him simply as a mountain man. He stood 1.91 metres.

Watford, and the Best Year

Watford paid £1.6 million for him in 2006 after a controversial late switch away from a move to West Bromwich Albion. It was the best football of his life: sixty-nine appearances, eight league goals, a season in the Premier League, and in 2007–08 nine goals in all competitions from centre-back and selection in the PFA Championship team of the year.

The Bolton Years

Bolton Wanderers then paid £2 million plus add-ons, and almost nothing followed. He made ten league appearances in 2008–09 and none at all in 2009–10. By the time he was released in September 2010, the arithmetic of his contract meant he had cost the club more than £160,000 for every game he played. It is the kind of statistic that ends careers.

The Den

Millwall took him on a free transfer, first for three months in 2010–11 and then, from August 2012, on a one-year contract. He was thirty-two, and he rebuilt. He captained the side through an eight-game unbeaten run while Paul Robinson was injured, and told the BBC that "the Championship is a hard, hard league to play in" and that he was proud to lead the team under Kenny Jackett, quoting the coaching philosophy that "zeros and ones win games." In 2012–13 he scored the decisive header against Blackburn Rovers that carried Millwall past the FA Cup quarter-finals and into a semi-final, was voted Player of the Year, and signed a two-year extension. He made seventy-eight appearances for the club across both spells and was released in May 2015 after relegation from League One.

Nigeria

He debuted for the Super Eagles on 26 March 2002 in a 1–1 draw with Paraguay, and won thirty-two caps between 2002 and 2010, largely under Berti Vogts. He played at the 2008 Africa Cup of Nations, where Nigeria lost in the quarter-finals to Ghana, and was part of the squad that finished third in 2010. That summer, despite having made no appearances whatsoever for Bolton across the entire 2009–10 season, he was named in Nigeria's twenty-three-man World Cup squad for South Africa and played in the group stage. He was dropped that September.

Why Danny Is Called a Genius

Nothing in Shittu's football supports the word, and it would be dishonest to manufacture a case. He was a big, brave, aerially dominant centre-back with a knack for scoring headers — twenty-nine goals in 346 league games is a substantial return for a defender — and a durable organiser who captained two clubs. That is craft, and the craft consists of unglamorous things: timing a jump against a man already moving, deciding in a fraction of a second whether to attack a cross or hold position, and staying legible to teammates through ninety minutes of noise.

If anything about Shittu deserves the description, it is not on the pitch at all. It is the decision-making of a seventeen-year-old with no route into the game who conducted a systematic, brute-force campaign — ninety-two letters, then a cold call — and converted a one-week trial into a sixteen-year career. That is an unusual quality of self-assessment and persistence, and it is the sort of thing that is easy to romanticise afterwards and was almost certainly terrifying at the time.

The counter-case is the plain record. He won no major honour. Thirty-two caps is a modest international return, and he was selected for a World Cup while not playing club football at all — a fact that reflects on Nigeria's selection as much as on him. The Bolton transfer was, by any measure, a failure that cost a club £160,000 a match. He was a good Championship defender who had one very good Premier League season. Calling that genius devalues both the word and the actual, respectable thing he was.

Legacy

Shittu's second career may outlast the first. He has run the Eastside Academy in London since 2002, and in 2010 launched Dan Shittu's Soccer Star Football Talent Hunt, explicitly to help young players "live their dream" — the phrasing of a man who remembers writing ninety-two letters. He spoke out against racism during his time at Millwall, a club with a complicated history on the subject, and won the PFA's community awards in 2013–14 and 2015. He is remembered at Loftus Road as a mountain man, at The Den as a captain who arrived at thirty-two and led, and in east London as evidence that the door occasionally opens if you keep knocking on it.